Will Zinc Boost Your Immune System and Protect From Covid or A Cold?
This season it may feel like everyone around you is sick. There are so many different viruses out there to avoid and it feels like every time you turn around someone is coming down with something – from the flu, COVID, Rhinovirus, Enterovirus and RSV (which you may just be learning about). It’s more than a tripledmeic.
A question I get asked a lot by my patients is if taking Zinc will help prevent them from getting sick or if it will make the duration of their sickness shorter. You may have noticed in the grocery store a growing number of products focused on zinc. From the wellness juice boosters that you see in the produce section, to zinc nose sprays, tinctures, lozenges, and supplements. But do they work to prevent sickness or boost your immune system? Watch now and find out.
Content Chapters:
00:00 – Introduction
00:56 – Season of Sickness
01:24 – Zinc Overview
02:24 – Importance of Zinc in the Body
03:10 – Zinc Deficiency
03:40 – Zinc Toxicity
04:01 – Zinc Systematic Review
04:46 – Zinc Trials
05:18 – Results of Trials
06:34 – Other Findings from Trials
07:54 – Conclusion
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Do you hear that cough cough sneeze sneeze is everybody around you sick coughing and sneezing just seems like everywhere you turn somebody’s coming down with something I didn’t want to get sick so I went to Whole Foods today and I bought myself three boosters an immune refresher shot another immune refresher shot with
Ginger turmeric and cayenne and then an interior defense shot with extra zinc and vitamin D are these things going to keep me healthy stay tuned let’s find out foreign thanks so much for watching today make sure you like this video subscribe to my channel and hit that
Bell so you never miss a new recipe or new health tip my name is Dr Blake Schusterman I’m a board certified kidney doctor and I’m also the cooking Doc and everything we talk about here today is just information please talk to your doctor if you have any questions or
Concerns about your health this is not medical advice so everyone is sick some is Coveted Lots is flu there’s enterovirus there’s rhinovirus and then there’s RSV which the whole world is getting introduced to now in case you’ve never heard of it before so what are the things that really work
To keep you healthy when it comes to these times do these immune boosters that you get from the store actually work well today we’re going to tackle one of the most common things that people get to prevent colds and that’s zinc so zinc is probably the most common
Supplement that people get to try to prevent themselves from getting sick so the jury is still out but let’s talk about why zinc has the potential to lower the number of days that you’re actually sick with a cold and we’re still looking to find out whether or not zinc can prevent you from
Getting a cold when you come into contact with those coughing and sneezing people that just don’t know how to cover their mouth or their nose so depending on the virus when you put zinc in that little test tube at certain concentrations really high concentrations with some viruses it may
Inhibit the way the virus infects people so it may inhibit some of the enzymes in the virus or it may inhibit the way the virus actually attachs to the cells and these are key things because if the virus is not doing those things then it’s not getting you sick so some of
These things work well in a test tube but they haven’t been tested necessarily in a live person and just because they work in a test tube does not mean they’re going to work in a live person anybody who’s followed scientific research knows that that is absolutely
The case but that’s not a death sentence for zinc I think there’s still some promising information to talk about now on The Human Side zinc is vital for a lot of bodily functions zinc wears men any hats it’s involved in everything from the way the enzymes work in our
Body to the way our immune system functions generating an immune response when we come into contact with viruses and bacteria so you can see why zinc is so important for us to have and why people think that it may benefit people if you have a cold so you want to make
Sure your body has enough zinc when that lunatic next to you on the plane is coughing and sneezing and rubbing his germy hands all over the seat so the first thing that’s important is to not be deficient in zinc because if you are deficient in zinc you are definitely
More susceptible to viruses and bacteria and fungus coming into your body most of us though are not deficient in zinc only 10 to 20 percent of the People based on a lot of the estimates that I’ve seen are deficient in zinc so those people that are deficient in zinc need zinc
Supplementation everybody else already has enough zinc so it’s the extra zinc that you’re taking going to actually help it’s also important to note that too much zinc is also a bad thing so zinc toxicity can cause you to have problems with your immunity just like zinc deficiency so in 2020 when
Everybody was trying to fight off covet 162 million dollars was spent in the United States on zinc supplementation let’s get into the data to see whether or not that actually helps people in 2021 there was a large systematic review of all the other studies that have been
Done about zinc so this is kind of a meta study a study of studies and so what they did is they pulled all those studies from the database and looked to see if they can make any generalizations about zinc based on pooling together all that other research the problem with
Pulling together all that research is that all studies are different so some of the studies looked at young people some looked at old people some looked at zinc lozenges some looked at zinc tinctures some looked at zinc nose sprays so in order to take all that data
And summarize it to get one answer is difficult but they were able to come to some interesting conclusions and find some patterns that they thought were important first there were two trials where they gave people zinc as a prophylaxis this is the one where like if you’re going on
A plane and you take zincs or you don’t get it from the person next to you anyways they gave these people zinc prophylaxis and then they gave them a cold they actually inoculated them with the virus itself these people are heroes that sign up for these kind of studies remember in 2020
When people were signing up to get coveted to see whether or not the treatments would help and how it affected the body these people are heroes thank goodness for all of them well what happened in these trials Well turns out that zinc didn’t make much of a difference the same number of people
Got a cold whether or not they had the zinc prophylaxis now this was a little different than a trial where they gave people zinc prophylaxis and they say well go out into the real world let’s see if you get a cold now those studies came with some different results those
Studies showed that zinc actually did prevent colds when we were out in the community and exposed to the virus now that kind of study has way more variables than things that can go wrong than one where you’re kind of directly inoculating somebody with a virus and
Also your alarm Bell should be going off right now because when two trials show different things or in this case multiple trials show multiple different things you know you can often come to the conclusion that we don’t know the answer yet now what will happen is
You’ll get people that don’t want to see that there are multiple conflicting data so there’s always that one person on the internet that will say zinc prevents colds and then they’ll pull up the one study that show that lo and behold that study shows that zinc prevents colds but
They won’t pull up the other five studies that show it doesn’t so when you have conflicting data I think the answer is still unknown other trials looked at symptom severity and duration so they wanted to know if maybe people who took zinc only coughed 20
Times on day two instead of 40 times or sneezing much less on day three or maybe they had a lower fever on day one those are kind of things that they wanted to know they also looked at whether or not your symptoms would be shortened so did
Zinc turn your five-day cold into a three-day cold because that would be key and so we’re still looking for better studies on zinc but there was a suggestion that if you start taking zinc on the first day of your cold you may have a shorter cold which is pretty important
I think we still need better data but if you’re going to take anything away from the zinc studies that’s the thing that I took away there’s a possibility that taking zinc will lower the number of days that you have a cold now how much zinc do you need to take to make that
Happen who the hell knows that’s the problem with these studies really is they’re all over the place so is it the lozenges is it the tincture is it the gel we just don’t know and if you take too much zinc it can feel bad you can
Get nausea or vomiting and as we talked about earlier if you take too too much zinc you can actually lower your immune system so finding that middle ground is kind of a guessing game so to summarize we don’t know who will benefit men or women or people who are just deficient we don’t
Know how much zinc you should take we don’t know when you should start taking the zinc we don’t know what type of zinc you should take and we don’t know exactly how much zinc is too much so a lot of unknowns out there but we do have suggestions that zinc May shorten the
Duration of your cold if you pick the right time the right type and the right virus now again this is not medical advice because zinc can make you feel sick and it can interact with a lot of medications but for a lot of people it may be worth a little bit of risk
Talk to your doctor if you want to consider it thanks so much for watching today I hope you’re staying healthy this winter make sure you subscribe to my channel click that like button hit that Bell I want to know if you take zinc comment in there let me know have you
Ever taken zinc for a cold do you try vitamin C do you try vitamin D I’ve got lots of other videos on the way where we’ll cover those topics check out my website thecooking.co for the best chicken soup to help cure your cold we’ll see you next time foreign
